Flags Fly Forever

The Texas Rangers are going to the World Series. It’ll be their third appearance all-time in the Fall Classic, and their first since going back-to-back in 2010 and 2011. In one of the great runs in recent memory, the 90-win Wild Card team went on the road and swept the 99-win Tampa Bay Rays, swept the 101-win Baltimore Orioles, and exercised some demons by defeating the defending-champion Houston Astros in an epic seven-game series.

It would be generous to say I expressed cautious optimism when last week I came on here and wrote, with a 2-0 series lead against the Astros, that:

Apparently all these historical facts are coming out, about how teams that go up 2-0 win the series 84% of the time, how no team has ever lost the first two games at home and ended up winning the series. This all points in the direction of the Rangers inevitably winning the fucking thing, moving on to the World Series. As a math guy I would say that is the likeliest of outcomes. But, again, we are talking about the Rangers. If ever history was going to turn on itself, it would be now.

As it were, the Astros won all three games in Texas, including one of the most soul-crushing games I have ever been witness to — during Game 5. With the Rangers holding on to a 4-2 lead in the bottom of the 8th inning, Astros reliever Bryan Abreu plunked Texas outfielder Adolis Garcia, igniting a benches-clearing situation and multiple ejections. It’s shit you never see in the American League Championship Series.

But these two teams, both from Texas, both from the same division, who both won 90 games during the regular season, have what the kids would call “history.” Not only recent history — which included benches-clearing drama back in like July — but longterm history. It was a decade ago when the Rangers arguably held the perennial title of being the Best Team In Baseball (or at least most talented), and during that era the Astros were in the middle of a five-year rebuild. Texas pounded Houston during that juncture, and was really able to put their stamp on being The Team in the state of Texas.

Unironically during Houston’s seven-year run of dominance, which included making the ALCS seven consecutive years and winning two world titles along the way, the Rangers were really bad and, thus, the Astros returned the favor by destroying them every chance they got. It was a dark period in the history of the Texas Rangers, given that they owned the AL West and American League as a whole but never won the World Series and as a consequence never really had anything to show for their success. The Astros, on the other hand, did.

2023 was finally the year where some overlap existed between the two squads, where both teams were competitive and inevitably met in a series that was worthy of being called the American League Championship Series. It would have been epic had the brawl that occurred during Game 5 resulted in a Rangers win en route to winning one of the next two games in Houston. But that isn’t what happened. Astros second baseman Jose Altuve hit a go-ahead three-run homer in the top of the 9th and the Astros won 5-4, giving them a 3-2 series advantage.

By then I had checked out. It was a good season, it was a good run by the Rangers. But the Astros are the monsters under the bed. They are what good baseball teams — even great ones — run into before the end of the road. They are there when you wake up, they are there when you go to sleep. No deficit is too large for them to overcome, no lead is too slim for them to hold onto. I was proud of how my favorite team fought, my Texas Rangers, and was happy that they at least made a competitive series out of it.

What’s crazy is it wasn’t over yet. I was resigned, of course, but after a day off for travel (back to Houston) the Rangers withstood the bases-loaded one-out storm holding a 4-2 lead in Game 6 and ended up scoring five runs in the 9th inning to win 9-2. In Game 7, the one to decide it all, Texas came out firing and took a 3-0 lead in the first inning and never really looked back. They won 11-4 and celebrated on Houston’s home field in a statement game that kind of felt like there was a changing of the guard.

To win their first World Series in franchise history the Rangers will have to win four games against the Arizona Diamondbacks, who are by far the lightest opponent talent-wise during this gauntlet of a postseason Texas has played. Arizona won just 84 games during the regular season, and the Rangers are a heavy -170 betting favorite to win it all. None of that means anything; it’s just the facts. Everything is right there in arm’s reach for my favorite team to accomplish the impossible dream.

Back in the early 2010’s decade, which is to say back when the Rangers were really fucking good, when they made their only two World Series appearances before this one, there was this saying, or concept, I guess would be a better way of putting it, that flags fly forever. A reddit poster defines it as:

The idea behind ‘flags fly forever’ is that once you win a championship, it’s a permanent achievement that can never be taken away from you, regardless of future outcomes. This is in contrast to other achievements or records in sports, which may be surpassed or replaced over time.

I believe it’s especially true in baseball, though, and in particular this Rangers team, because so much of the roster was conceptualized via free agency, or in other words buying talent. A significant part of the reason baseball failed me as I got older was because I romanticized the ideal makeup of building a roster through homegrown players. I always want to win, of course, but what I really want, or wanted, I guess you could say, was to win with prospects that the Rangers drafted and developed. That’s why I wanted it so badly in 2010 and 2011, because those teams were built with my hopes and dreams in mind.

This Rangers team is different. Marcus Semien and Corey Seager were acquired in free agency. The pitching staff is made up of high-priced free agents. Almost everywhere you look, it was not draft picks who came up through their minor league system. It was players who were acquired from elsewhere. So I have a different connection to this team than I did the others, back when I was in my late-teenage and early-20’s years.

Maybe it comes with age that my idealism and romanticism of the sport has evaporated. Maybe in my early-20’s I was a victim to the thought that the good times would never stop, not when it came to the Rangers. Maybe at some point I stopped believing that the most important thing was winning The Right Way, when in reality, now, presently, all I care about is winning at all. Championships, and opportunities at championships, are so fleeting. I used to live and die on the Texas Rangers winning playoff baseball games, but no longer. Now I just live, and I’m just happy when they get to the ultimate series — which I have now only experienced three times in my 33 years of life.

I dare say that I would be remiss not to mention Jon Daniels, the former General Manager and President of Baseball Operations, whose fingerprints are all over this current roster and whose trail of breadcrumbs is the reason the Rangers are now here. It was August 22nd, 2022, just 14 months ago, that I wrote about his firing and how much it hurt and all the childhood memories of mine that he took with him.

By the day, and by the individual game, and by the series, and everything else that brought us, and the Texas Rangers, here, right here, four wins away from their first-ever championship, I feel more and more vindicated by my love for and belief in him. He was the guy. He was always the guy. He was the one who built the teams from a lifetime ago, in 2010 and 2011, who got so close to glory, and he was the one who built this team, this current team.

Current General Manager and former MLB starting pitcher Chris Young was, I thought, very magnanimous in saying, after the Rangers beat the Astros in Game 7, that: “It makes me extremely proud, but this started before I came along, with [owner] Ray Davis and and Jon Daniels and everybody else in our front office and organization who started the foundation for this.”

He didn’t have to do that. That’s all I’m saying. In the heat of the moment, in a big-business type of sport such as baseball, I think it would be easiest to click the self-gratification button rather than giving credit to the old regime. So I hold him in higher regard for mentioning Daniels, and I’m proud to say that that, too, is The Right Way, even if this team wasn’t built in the same humble way as Jon Daniels did it.

Listen, there is a very real possibility that the Rangers break my heart again. Honestly I am actually kind of prepared for it. Baseball is not one of those sports that tends to reward the best team. Lady luck generally doesn’t favor The Right Way. Nothing ever comes easy for my favorite teams, yet in my lifetime I have been very fortunate, or blessed, or whatever else you want to call it, by being able to say that some of my favorite teams have reached the top of the mountain. They have planted their flags. And they have made me a very happy boy, at one time, and a very happy young man, at another, and a very happy grownup man.

Yes, I am talking about Duke’s basketball team in 2001, when I was getting updates from a pager of one of my coaches during a Little League Game, when they beat the University of Arizona; I’m talking about Duke in 2010, when they beat Butler. I’m talking about Duke in 2015 when they beat Wisconsin. I’m talking about the Kansas City Chiefs in 2020 when they beat the San Francisco 49ers; I’m talking about the Chiefs, again, in 2023, when they beat the Philadelphia Eagles.

But I’ve never had the chance to talk about the Texas Rangers, right? That would be a first. I have, and I do, much as I am doing now, talk about what if’s and what could be’s, but I have never gotten to write the ultimate blog about my favorite baseball team. I have never been able to cross that one off the bucket list. I have always wanted to, and I thought I was going to back in 2010, and 2011, and at various stages of the mid-2010’s. But it never came. It never happened.

I want it to happen. I want it so badly. It sounds like I’m praying or something. Like I’m 19 or 20 or 21 years old again just saying hey, let it happen. Let it happen just this once. Let it happen and I will never ask for anything ever again. I’d be lying, of course, because I would want it again the next time, and the next, and the next. But for right now, why not? Why not just once?